Existing literature has mostly explained the occurrence of bullying victimization by individual socioemotional maladjustment. Instead, this study tested the person-group dissimilarity model (Wright et al., "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology," 50: 523-536, 1986) by examining whether individuals' deviation from developmentally…

Little is known about how children's value priorities develop over time. This study identifies children's value priority profiles and follows their development during middle childhood. Australian children (N = 609; ages 5-12 at Time 1) reported their values over 2 years. Latent Transition Analysis indicated four profiles: Social-Focus, Self-Focus,…

This multimethod study of 101 mothers, fathers, and children elucidates poorly understood role of children's attachment security as "moderating" a common maladaptive trajectory: from parental power assertion, to child resentful opposition, to child antisocial conduct. Children's security was assessed at 15 months, parents' power assertion observed…

Language is drawn on extensively in friendships but has received scant attention in the developmental literature. This study compared friendship quality in 16-year-old adolescents with and without specific language impairment (SLI), testing the extent it is predicted by individual differences in social behaviors and language ability. Participants…

During the summer before first grade, 22 boys were videotaped as they attempted to enter a group composed of two unfamiliar boys. Confederates of the experimenter, the unfamiliar boys enacted scripted games and presented several scripted problematic social situations. Subjects' behavior in the setting was used to predict their first-grade…

This study examined reciprocal-influence models of the association between relational self-views and peer stress during early adolescence. The first model posited that adolescents with negative self-views disengage from peers, creating stress in their relationships. The second model posited that exposure to peer stress fosters social…

Examined multiple measures of 82 young children's emotionality, regulation, and social functioning over a 2-year period, finding that social functioning was predicted by low negative emotionality and high levels of regulation. Also found that vagal tone was positively related to competent social functioning and emotionality/regulation for boys,…

This study assessed the hypothesis that popularity in adolescence takes on a twofold role, marking high levels of concurrent adaptation but predicting increases over time in both positive and negative behaviors sanctioned by peer norms. Multimethod, longitudinal data, on a diverse community sample of 185 adolescents (13 to 14 years), addressed…

Assessed mothers' childrearing attitudes and toddler behavior to predict mothers' emotions, attributions, parenting goals, and socialization strategies in response to vignettes depicting aggressive and withdrawn child behaviors two years later. Found that most child effects were moderated by maternal attitudes or gender effects. Authoritarian…